Featuing Extra Photos!

The
craftsman featured on the pages linked below has produced a large volume of extraordinarily
high quality work. We have provided more photos than normal as a teaching
experience. Certain craftsmen set the standards in their area of expertise, and
studying the details of their work can be helpful for anyone wishing to follow
in their footsteps or take their work to the next level. Not every viewer will
want to enlarge every photo, but those interested in achieving this level of
craftsmanship will find doing so instructive and, hopefully, inspiring.

The
Internet Craftsmanship Museum Presents:

Jerry Kieffer

A model engineer who
insists on total perfection and building
every part "to scale"

Jerry
Kieffer is not a professional machinist.
He recently retired as a field representative for a
Wisconsin power company, and most of his
skills were attained by trial and error,
but his home shop turns out some of the
finest and smallest examples of model
engineering to be found anywhere in the
world.

Click on the slide to see a
PowerPoint® slide show of a selection of Jerry's work. (Once opened, click on
screen to advance to next slide. Right click screen to select "full screen" or
to end show.) Don't have PowerPoint?
CLICK HERE to download a free PowerPoint viewer from Microsoft.

About
Jerry Kieffer

Jerry Kieffer is not a lifelong
machinist. He has developed his skills
in many areas simply because he was not
satisfied with the work of others and
felt he could do the job better himself.
He has applied his skills to watch
repair, gun repair, clock making and
model engine construction to name just a
few. The project that first brought him
attention was a 1/30 scale Corliss steam
engine model. The tiny bolt shown below
was a 1/30 scale version of a 1/4-20
bolt used as an actual fastener on the
model. Jerry developed a system of taps
and dies to produce these tiny fasteners
so that the model would be completely
scale down to the smallest detail. He
was making the model because he had been
told by others that a running engine
could not be made completely to scale at
that small size. Jerry's has built a 1/6 scale
running model of a 1947 Harley Davidson
"knucklehead" motorcycle engine. Now he is working on a 1/8 version
that will be included in a fully functional motorcycle model. His goal is to be
able to kick start it and have all functions down to the speedometer work. He
has also completed a running 1936 John Deere tractor in 1/8 scale as well as
several other clock, miniature machine tool and engine projects. See the bottom
of the page for links to individual projects.

Many of the projects Jerry takes on
are driven by a challenge, either from
himself or from a friend, and this was
no exception. The following magazine
article details the project and also
gives a good insight into what makes
Jerry tick and how he goes about
tackling a project.

The tiny bolt and
wrench shown above where what first
brought Jerry's skills to the attention
of Joe Martin. (Click on photo for
larger version.) The .009" diameter
hex bolt and nut are used as functional
fasteners on Jerry's 1/30 scale Corliss
steam engine. (Jerry also turned the
knurled brass display bezel for the bolt
and wrench.) The following magazine
article which was published in
The Home Shop Machinist
will tell you a lot about Jerry
and how he works.

Sometimes "good
enough" just isn't good enough

One modeler's quest
for uncompromising accuracy leads to a
magnificent model and a $1000.00 prize

A photo of Jerry's
1/30th Corliss engine. At the bottom, a
U.S. 25-cent coin can be seen to give
scale. Tiny handles, oilers, oil lines,
fittings and other details are perfect,
even under strong magnification. (Click
on photo for larger image.)

It seemed like a fairly
straightforward project when he started.
Jerry Kieffer of DeForest, Wisconsin
wanted to build a model of a Corliss
steam engine, he wanted to make it in a
smaller scale than usually attempted and
he wanted no compromises when it came to
scale. He saw the engine he wanted too
model in a steam show in Sussex,
Wisconsin, so he could get all the
dimensions and pictures he needed from
the original. The flywheel was ten feet
in diameter, and he had a piece of
4-inch thinwall tubing from a truck
driveshaft in his shop that would be
just the right size if he worked in
1/30th scale. He had done some watch
repair and had a selection of the
smallest bolts, nuts and screws
commercially available, so he figured
when he got to the smallest parts, he
would use those as fasteners. He had
never liked other models he had seen
where the builder compromised on the
scale by using larger, non-scale bolts
and pipes to represent the smallest
parts. He wanted a running engine with
everything to scale.

They told him it
couldn't be done...

Though he had no formal training in
machining and only about eight years
experience as a hobbyist, he was always
good with tools and enjoyed working on
very small projects. He built the
flywheel first and then parts of the
cylinder. Working his way down from the
larger to the smaller parts. By the time
he had about a year and a half in the
model and had told several friends of
his project, he found that the smallest
screws from a tiny lady's wristwatch
were still going to be much too large.
They were twice the size of a regulator
shaft he needed to cross drill and bolt
at a pivot joint. Rather than give up on
the project or compromise on the scale
of the smallest parts, he began to work
on ways to make smaller and smaller
bolts. The smallest bolts on the real
engine were 1/4-20 size, which scaled
out to a bolt smaller than ten
thousandths of an inch in diameter with
hundreds of threads per inch at 1/30th
scale! There was nowhere to go for
advice on making threaded parts that
small, as his friends in the hobby told
him working bolts that small couldn't be
made.

...and they were
wrong

After many efforts at trial and error
and "just playing with things until
they work", Jerry developed
techniques of making extremely small
taps and dies the size and thread count
he needed. From these he could make tiny
hex head nuts and bolts. There were no
shortcuts, and many taps would be broken
to make a single die, but once he had a
die, making the little bolts was
relatively easy. In fact, if you ask him
if it is hard making bolts that small,
he'll tell you, "Making them is
easy. It was figuring out how to
make them that was hard."

His motto tells a
story of uncompromising quality

When drilling holes in a steam chest
that will eventually receive a number of
these tiny bolts, it is not uncommon to
break off a tap in one of the drilled
holes. When this happens, Jerry throws
away the part and starts over. When
asked why he doesn't just drill out the
broken tap with an oversize hole, fill
it with a dowel pin and re-drill rather
than scrapping the part, Jerry replied,
"Because someday, somebody is going
to take this thing apart and they'll
know I screwed up." He simply
refuses to compromise his goals for
perfection at any level...even if it
will probably never be seen by anyone
else. He would know the mistake was
there, and that is enough to make him
redo the entire part until it is
perfect. Jerry goes on to say,
"Most people are willing to do
about 90% of the work on a project and
then say, 'That's good enough'. I guess
my motto would be 'Good enough just
isn't good enough'".

The details are there
even if they can't be seen

Each handwheel, lever and fitting is
a miniature reproduction of the exact
shapes of the original, and each
presented its own problems and resulting
solutions. Some details are not even
seen once the parts are assembled, but
they're there. For example, the model
needed a very small, hollow oil line.
Jerry finally located a company that
manufactured hypodermic syringes and
purchased some of the very fine, hollow
tubing used to make the smallest
needles. He bent that to shape and made
tiny compression fittings for each end
so that the oil line is functional. Just
looking at it, there is no way to tell
it is not just a piece of wire, but it
is hollow and it does work, and Jerry
knows that when he looks at his model.

The real Corliss engine uses vacuum
dashpots to retract part of the valve
gear. On virtually every model of this
type of engine, the modeler hides a
spring inside the housing that acutally
retracts the rods, as no one looking at
it can tell the difference. On Jerry's
model, however, the dashpots actually
pull a vacuum to retract the
rods...another example of his total
devotion to realism.

It looks great, but
does it run?

Jerry lubricates the system with a
few drops of light oil and attaches a
tube from a small electric aquarium air
pump to the input pipe, gives the
flywheel a gentle push and the little
engine springs to life. Delicate
adjustment with the tip of a finger on
the regulating handwheel of only a few
degrees produces an instant change in
speed. It operates smoothly and almost
soundlessly as low as just 3 RPM! The
tiny "banjo oiler" on the main
bearing seems to hang suspended in space
as the shaft rotates around it. The rods
and valves circulate in an intricate
motion as the cylinder pumps back and
forth. It runs as perfectly as it looks.
This model has made believers out of a
number of "experts" who told
Jerry it was impossible to maintain
scale sizes down to this level and still
have an engine that works.

Inexpensive miniature
machine tools used to make tiny parts

To complete the challenge to himself,
Jerry made the Corliss engine using a
Sherline Model 4000 miniature lathe and
Sherline Model 5000 vertical milling
machine that only cost about $500 each.
This should be encouraging to those who
think that you need both years of
experience as a machinist and a big shop
full of large and expensive machine
tools to do good work. Jerry takes pride
in letting people know that the projects
were built with "less than $1000
worth of machine tools."

Exceptional
craftsmanship nets a $1000 award

For his work on this and other models
he has completed, Jerry was recently
awarded the honor of "Metalworking
Craftsman of the Year" for 1997 by
the Joe Martin Foundation for
Exceptional Craftsmanship. This annual
award goes to craftsmen in various
fields of miniature machining and is
accompanied by a check for $1000. Jerry
was the first person selected to win
this award. Jerry
is a marketing representative for a
Wisconsin utility company and has only
been working with machine tools in his
spare time for about eight years, which
makes his accomplishments all the more
impressive. Prior to this recognition,
Jerry says the only thing he had won was
"a quart of oil for an entry at a
county fair". Jerry's current work
illustrates that some of the most
interesting projects can be found at the
small end of the size scale and require
little more than time and the
determination to do a really good job.

Magazine articles
about Jerry's work

An excellent article about Jerry and
his home shop can be found in the April,
1998 issue of Modeltec magazine,
and an article about the Corliss engine
was published in the September, 1997
issue. An article about his projects
from the British perspective can be
found in the April, 1999 issue of Model
Engineer. Jerry has also written an
article about how to make oak finger
jointed boxes to protect and carry your
metalworking projects that was published
in the 2001 "Common threads"
issues of both The Home Shop
Machinist and Machinist's
Workshop magazines.

Other impressive projects have followed

Since Jerry was selected as the Foundation's first Craftsman of the Year, he
has gone on to bolster that reputation by building a number of incredible
projects. These include two miniature Harley Davidson motorcycles, a 1/8 scale
John Deere tractor, several other steam and gas engines, clocks and other
projects. Links to each of these projects and details of their construction can
be found below.

Here
are links to sections on some of Jerry's projects:

(Click
on photo to veiw a page on that project.)

1/8 Scale 1936 John
Deere "D" tractor—This tractor is fully functional. Photos of its
construction and video of it running can be seen by visiting this page. It
is now completed and painted.

Clocks and clock tools—Jerry
also makes clocks and clock tools and teaches seminars at the NWACC clock
school. See his "Ignatz" flying pendulum clock
and other projects here.

Other engines and projects—Jerry has built
numerous other interesting steam and IC engines, a cam grinder and other projects
that are detailed here.

New
Submissions Welcomed

If you have additional
information on a project or builder
shown on this site that your would like
to contribute, please e-mail craig@CraftsmanshipMuseum.com.
We also welcome new contributions.
Please see our page at www.CraftsmanshipMuseum.com/newsubmit.htm
for a submission form and guidelines for
submitting descriptive copy and photos
for a new project.

This section is sponsored by

Makers of precision
miniature machine tools and accessories. Sherline tools are made in the USA.

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